The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

Monica Wood Unlawful Contact from Mãnoa

The last time I saw my brother I came home burdened with pretty things, ornamental nothings I’d come upon while browsing through the string of perfumed boutiques in town. Except for the earrings my brother bought for me on a whim, they were my purchases: hair clasps, silk flowers, wind chimes, marbles. I had no use for them and no one I cared to give them to, but that day in my brother’s presence their luster seemed necessary. While my brother and I watched, salesgirls wrapped the trinkets in rustly, translucent, pastel-colored tissue, then dropped them into shiny bags of the same colors. The earrings I wore home.

I can imagine how we must have looked that day, my brother lumbering behind me, his two years of prison a dull mask over his face. He’d cut his hair and buttoned his shirt to the top, as if to camouflage the length of days that trailed him; but they followed him anyway, as visible as tin cans tied to the backs of his shoes.

Our meeting was a secret, though we met in a public place — the park square downtown, in the heart of the waterfront shopping district. He waited under the red sprawl of a sugar maple, head down, hands thrust deep in his pockets. I could have ducked behind a building and gone home with a free mind, with nothing further to hide from my husband and daughter, but I stood in the open until he saw me.

We greeted each other like strangers, or worse than strangers: we did not hug or shake hands; we simply faced each other and said hello. We settled ourselves on a bench like people waiting for a bus, looking straight into the emptiness before us. We said a few things, about our mother’s health, and our sister’s upcoming wedding (to which my brother would not be invited), and the weather, and how hard it was to find work after prison.

“Do they know you’re here?” he asked.

He was still a young man but looked so shockingly old.

“Meg?” he said.

“No.” I was staring at the flower beds that ringed the park, the frilly summer flowers gone now, replaced by stiffer blooms in muted colors.

He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. I watched him light one and inhale. He shrugged, an apology. “You pick up some bad habits.”

I nodded. The smell of cigarettes was a comfort because it was unfamiliar — he could have been anybody.

“It’s not going to cost you, is it?” he said. “Coming out here, I mean.”

I didn’t answer until he’d smoked the cigarette down. He made a long sucking sound and then stamped the cigarette out with the sole of his shoe. He was thinly dressed for the weather but didn’t appear to be cold.

“I did it for Mom,” I said. “Fifteen minutes, I told her. Say what you have to say.”

He lit another, and the smoke escaped with a small whistle between his teeth. “I wanted to see you, was all.”

“That’s it?”

“I miss you, Meg, I miss all of you,” he said. “You, and Brent, and—”

“No,” I told him, “don’t use her name.”

He whistled out more smoke. “It’s you I missed the worst. I haven’t talked to anybody in years. It takes a toll.”

This much I understood. He had aged in prison, and I was reminded that I must have aged too, in the same way.

My brother and I had always talked. Even after we were both married he was a fixture at my house, stopping by on his way home from work, and we’d visit in the kitchen for a few minutes before getting on to the next part of the day. Sundays he dropped in to watch part of a ball game with Brent, or take the three of us out for ice cream. Brent had no brothers of his own and loved mine, and Jenny adored her only uncle. He was always welcome in our home; after a while he didn’t even bother to knock. He’d simply step through the door and join the family dance.

At that time, I believed he was still the brother of my childhood. I believed he could save me from some of the world’s harms, given the right circumstances, as he had one summer saved me from the black and weedy water under our capsized canoe. We had dated each other’s best friend; we had lied for each other to our stern, unyielding parents; we had accompanied each other in a silent vigil at our father’s wake and funeral. Those days, white with distance, still bound us.

After his divorce Brent and I invited him over two or three times a week for supper. But he was a mess: he missed his wife, missed his house; he was drinking too much. He was a pleasant drunk, though, and we used to wait it out together, chatting in the living room until he was sober enough to drive home. Sometimes we reminisced about our childhood, our mother and father, our sister, Beth. Often we complained about our mother, who was getting cranky with age, or told each other little dramatic stories about people at work. He and Brent talked work, too, and sports. With Jenny, my brother played games: Go to the Head of the Class when she was ten, and Monopoly when she was eleven, and computer games when she was thirteen. When she was fourteen, they’d just talk. It was on one of these occasions, when Jenny was fifteen and a half, that my brother, long drunk and feeling generous, gave my daughter a taste of what a man’s hand could find on a woman’s body if it had a mind to.

She told her father first, moments after we got home. We’d been to a movie, one we’d chosen for a famous sex scene, which was shot low and which dissolved into black and white at the end. Our marriage had fallen dormant of late, a sleepy partnership that needed the shoring up we were happy to give it.

Every light in the house was on, and the radio, and the dishwasher, and the television, and the stereo — a clash of light and sound that was so wrong my heart was tearing up my chest before we got the door open.

“Who was here?” I asked her, looking around, thinking burglar, rapist, one of those boys from her school. She shrank against the wall, her pixie features lost and shriveled, and asked to speak to her father.

Wrestling, I heard her say as I eavesdropped, shaking, on the other side of the door. He said he could teach me wrestling.

Brent tore out of the house and went raging over to my brother’s apartment, and by the time I got there it was done: the police had arrived and my brother — his face dirty with tears and blood — was wincing under the officers’ questions. Brent was sulking by the door, his knuckles rubbed raw. It was my brother who had called the police, to save himself from harm.

She didn’t tell me first because she thought I wouldn’t believe her. It’s true that I didn’t speak right away, that I hesitated too long, that my first thought was not for her. My temples throbbed with the difficulty of believing them both, my head was crammed with two truths trying to fit into a space that would take only one. When finally I attempted to comfort my daughter, she found my arms unconvincing, my voice a small and suspect thing.

Brent believed her, believed such a thing of my brother, believed without a moment’s thought, an instinct that — in the torment of therapists and victim advocates and assistant prosecutors that blotted our life for so many months afterward — made him the good parent, the one who could believe in evil on the turn of a dime.

We waited nearly a year for the trial, and in that time my family — I mean my first family, the one that included my brother — disintegrated as subtly as the afterimage of a fireworks. Everything we ever were as a family, everything we had ever shared — every morsel of food, every dog and hamster, every yes and no and sorry — was gone, replaced by the knowledge of what we might be capable of, what sin lay waiting in our souls.

My other family, Brent and Jenny, underwent an even subtler dissolution: we moved through the same house, ate at the same table, occasionally even laughed together or made each other proud. But I dragged around like a phantom limb the part of me that believed my brother, and in some unnameable way I knew my husband and daughter had stopped speaking to me.

The trial came, an unseemly ritual that held at its core my daughter’s high, halting voice and my brother’s tense denials. Strange men asked the questions I had not asked, for until the trial I’d had no wish for clarity. I listened to every word, and what I was listening for were the details — exactly where he had put his hands, the farthest reach of his fingers — so I would know how far I had to hate him, and how much room was left on the other side.

He had done this, but not that. They used real words, ugly words — vagina and nipple and pubic hair — words that dripped like a dirty rain from the domed roof. Brent sat next to me, his jaw set like a watchdog’s, his fingers braided together, avoiding mine. My brother was found guilty of unlawful sexual contact and we all went home.

I got up, leaving my brother smoking on the park bench, suddenly bent on blending our secret into the cheerful clumps of midday shoppers picking their way over the cobblestones. He followed me and I let him. We eased into and out of the handsome little stores, and my brother watched as I picked up and handled every necklace and knickknack that pleased my eye. My brother’s ugly shadow made me so greedy for pretty things; I wanted everything I saw, an embarrassment I carried around that day with the pastel bags I wouldn’t let my brother hold for me.

It was a perfect New England fall day, sunny and cool, the city blazing all around us. If we had merely spoken on the phone, or perhaps met on the dark porch of our mother’s house, or even if I had visited him once in prison — but our meeting was public in every way, and it was too late now not to claim him. That we were meeting, that I still hoped to find in his face the brother of my childhood were things I would have to account for.

The earrings cost forty dollars, money I know my brother couldn’t spare, living with our mother and out of work. We spotted them at the same moment and reached for them, touching hands. He started to draw away, but I held his hand, and then picked up the other, as if they were two halves of a rock I’d found on the beach; I examined the tobacco stains, the starry cracks over the knuckles, the tattered fingernails, the healed-over cuts. Weighing what they might have done. I saw my brother’s hands as a thing apart from him, and again I found myself believing they were what they seemed to be: the hands of my brother, not unlike mine in shape — narrow, innocent. I let him go.

Fashioned out of some sort of blue shell, the earrings had a graceful, bell-like shape and a thin lattice of gold around the bottom curve. Displayed alone on a tray of black velvet, they were heartbreakingly beautiful. And because they were beautiful I wanted them badly. I let my brother buy them for me; I understood that he was not buying them to make up for the cost of my meeting him but because he too was taken with their beauty and he too — on that crisp fall day amid scores of ordinary people and bright storefronts and soulful dogs tied temporarily to lampposts — was seized, unexpectedly, by hope.

“Remember that big shell we found one time at Silver’s Beach?” my brother said to me.

“No,” I said. The earrings were on, I could feel their pearly shine. I felt decorated, cleansed, acquainted once again with beauty.

“Don’t you?” he insisted, a lilt creeping into his voice. We stepped into the street, which was calm now, mostly empty. It was late. We’d been together for hours. “I’m talking about the little cove at the end, near the Crosbys’ camp,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, though of course I did remember: the most vivid pink shell, huge and heavy, planted there by my father, who was given to grand gestures. But it belonged in the part of our life that no longer existed.

“It was pink,” he said, but he’d lost heart. He pulled out another cigarette and held it between his ragged fingers.

We arrived at my car, and he opened the door to let me fill the front seat with the delicate pastel bags. I wondered whether a passerby would know that here was a man two weeks out of prison, staring into the hole that was the rest of his life.

“Do you think we might, I don’t know, get together again?” my brother said. He stamped out another cigarette. “What do you say, Meg?”

“We’ll see,” I told him. “I don’t know.”

“Meg,” he said. His hands went to his pockets and he held his elbows tight against his body. “Meg, it was only that one time—”

“Oh,” I whispered. “Please. God.” All this time he had left me with the smallest hope, and in a word it was gone. I was weeping like a child, for the part of me I’d held in reserve, for him, had cracked open and joined the muddy slide of my heart.

He contorted his scarred, prisoner’s face. “Meg, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t.” I put up my hands as if to defend myself.

“I’m not drinking anymore, if that means anything to you.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Meg, if there was any way—”

“The only way is to undo it,” I said. My voice was nearly gone. “That’s the only way,” I said again. “Undo it.”

I said it as if I believed he could. He hugged me hard then, knocking me off balance, and I might have let out a small cry of alarm — I think I remember seeing a man on the sidewalk stop and turn — but I recovered before falling and then he was off, lurching across the street like a fugitive. I watched him get smaller and smaller, until he finally turned a corner and disappeared.

When I pulled into my driveway, I sat in the dusk for a while, looking into the lighted windows of my house. Brent was already home, in his favorite chair in the den, and Jenny was moving back and forth in the kitchen, getting herself a snack. They were in different rooms, but something about their proximity was companionable, as if they’d been conversing through the doorway. Jenny was taller than she had been back then — a college girl now — and more graceful, though a certain furtiveness had crept into her carriage, a suspicion that I didn’t remember from before. I got out of the car and circled the house, stopping to stuff my packages in the trash, then came in the side door, through the kitchen. Jenny’s eyes — the wide-set, greenish eyes of my brother — moved from my face, to the earrings, and back again.

“You saw him, didn’t you,” she said. She stood at the counter, watching me over her shoulder, her palms flat down as if someone had hired her to guard the food.

Brent appeared then, folding his reading glasses, squinting in my direction. “Saw who?” he asked.

They had become strangers to whom I was irrevocably tied. We might have survived a train wreck or witnessed a murder, unable to meet each other again without evoking a physical memory. Our intimacy was an awkwardness we endured without naming, and it had erased the simple fact of mother-father-daughter that had once defined us.

My hand, of its own accord, went to my left ear.

“He gave you those, didn’t he,” Jenny said.

“Christ,” Brent muttered. “I knew it.”

It look me a long time to get them off. On one of the earrings especially, the post was a snug fit, and I had to work at it for a few moments before my family’s unforgiving eye — the polished shell no doubt spewing little sparks of light all the while I could have told them I didn’t say your name. I didn’t say his. For my family, however, betrayal was not a matter of degree.

I told them later that I threw the earrings out, flung them in a fit of remorse into the scrubby stand of trees at the far end of our yard. This was a lie, not my first. I kept them in my purse for days, and later moved them to the back of my top dresser drawer, rolled into a pair of cast-off gym socks, then I hid them again, and it has been long enough now that I can’t say for sure where they are, only that they are somewhere in this house, two blue shells wrapped in a rustle of tissue. I hid them understanding that I would not show them or wear them or look at them ever again but would know, at times exactly like this, that they exist somewhere in all their original beauty, hidden but not altogether gone from this world.